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MYTHS AND PHYSICAL EVENTS. THE INTERIOR MEDIUM IN WHICH SOCIETY EXISTS

Dictation: A new chapter (3), to be titled: “Myths and Physical Events.” (Long pause.) Then: “The Interior Medium in Which Society Exists.”

The world’s ideas, fantasies, or myths may seem far divorced from current experience — yet all that you know or experience has its origin in that creative dimension of existence that I am terming Framework 2. In a manner of speaking your factual world rises on a bed of fantasy, myth, and imagination, from which all of your detailed paraphernalia emerge. What then is myth, and what do I mean by the term?

Myth is not a distortion of fact, but the womb through which fact must come. Myth involves an intrinsic understanding of the nature of reality, couched in imaginative terms, carrying a power as strong as nature itself. Myth-making is a natural psychic characteristic, a psychic element that combines with other such elements to form a mythical representation of inner reality. That representation is then used as a model upon which your civilizations are organized, and also as a perceptual tool through whose lens you interpret the private events of your life in their historical context.

(10:06.) When you accept myths you call them facts, of course, for they become so a part of your lives, of societies and your professions, that their basis seems self-apparent. Myths are vast psychic dramas, more truthful than facts. They provide an ever-enduring theater of reality. It must be clearly understood, then, that when I speak of myths I mean to imply the nature of psychic events whose enduring reality exists in Framework 2, and forms the patterns that are then interpreted in your world.

Now: Myths are natural phenomena, rising from the psyche of man as surely as giant mountain ranges emerge from the physical planet. Their deeper reality exists, however, in Framework 2 as source material for the world that you know.

In those terms, the great religions of your civilizations rise from myths that change their character through the centuries, even as mountain ranges rise and fall. You can see mountain ranges. It would be ridiculous to ignore their reality. You see your myths somewhat less directly, yet they are apparent within all of your activities, and they form the inner structures of all of your civilizations with their multitudinous parts.

In those terms, then, Christianity and your other religions are myths, rising in response to an inner knowledge that is too vast to be clothed by facts alone. In those terms also, your science is also quite mythical in nature. This may be more difficult for some of you to perceive, since it appears to work so well. Others will be willing enough to see science in its mythical characteristics, but will be most reluctant to see religion as you know it in the same light. To some extent or another, however, all of these ideas program your interpretation of events.

In this part (2) of the book, we are more or less dealing with the events of nature as you understand it. It will seem obvious to some, again, that a natural disaster is caused by God’s vengeance, or is at least a divine reminder to repent, while others will take it for granted that such a catastrophe is completely neutral in character, impersonal and [quite] divorced from man’s own emotional reality. The Christian scientist is caught in between. Because you divorce yourselves from nature, you are not able to understand its manifestations. Often your myths get in the way. When myths become standardized, and too literal, when you begin to tie them too tightly to the world of facts, then you misread them entirely. When myths become most factual they are already becoming less real. Their power becomes constrained.

(10:43.) Give us a moment… Most people interpret the realities of their lives, their triumphs and failures, their health or illness, their fortune or misfortune, then, in the light of a mythical reality that is not understood as such. What is behind these myths, and what is their source of power?

Facts are a very handy but weak brew of reality. They immediately consign certain kinds of experiences as real and others as not. The psyche, however, will not be so limited. It exists in a medium of reality, a realm of being in which all possibilities exist. It creates myths the way the ocean creates spray. Myths are originally psychic fabrications of such power and strength that whole civilizations can rise from their source. They involve symbols and known emotional validities that are then connected to the physical world, so that that world is never the same again.